With the number of foreigners increasing in Japan – there were 3.4 million in December 2023, an increase of more than 10% over one year – the question of facial control is the subject of growing contestation in the Archipelago. Testifying in April in the center-left daily Mainichian anonymous police officer admits to having come to consider “that orders to ‘get tough on foreigners’ – in other words, judge them on their appearance alone – constituted a violation of human rights”.
The officer, who spent ten years in the police, says that assigned to a local police station, he had to “target foreigners to question them and check their resident cards. There was “a month of repression of foreigners” during which it was necessary to redouble efforts to check cards, but also [les] search for drugs or knives”. The order came from the criminal investigation division, looking for illegal immigrants. These checks did not target particular ethnic groups, but, specifies the police officer, there was prejudice against “blacks or Southeast Asians” or even the Koreans – the second largest foreign population in Japan, long victims of discrimination.
Facial testing was condemned in 2020 by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which recommended action to prevent it. On the Archipelago, the question was publicly raised in December 2021, when the United States Embassy in Japan expressed concern on its Twitter account about having “received an increasing number of testimonies of foreigners stopped and searched by the police for no reason other than racial profiling”.
Reacting to this message, Japanese parliamentarians asked the National Police Agency to conduct an internal investigation. In November 2022, the latter recognized six cases of inappropriate or unreasonable control, based on racial stereotypes. At the time, and while Japan banned all entry due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the police intensified checks on foreigners to find those in an irregular situation. It particularly targeted neighborhoods with a large foreign population such as Okubo in Tokyo.
A negative image
A survey by the Tokyo Bar, conducted between January and February 2022 among foreign residents, also revealed that 62.9% of the 2,094 people questioned had been questioned by the police over the last five years. Among them, 85.4% had been approached because they were foreigners.
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